Risking Our Kids

All those narcissistic whingers writing to the papers complaining about the inequity of childess taxpayers subsidising paid parental leave should have a listen to what Fiona Stanley has to say about the health of our children and the social and economic implications it has for our future.

Following Fiona Stanley and her team of scientists from their cutting edge laboratories to remote Aboriginal communities and into increasingly wealthy but unhealthy homes around Australia this film builds the case for what is being called the “the modernity paradox”. Can it be that our contemporary western lifestyle is delivering a toxic physical and social environment in which children are growing up sick?

Risking Our Kids, the first of ABC’s Future Makers series, will not be comfortable viewing for free market deregulation progress-at-any-cost junkies. Stanley lays responsibility for the health crises among the young people of the world at the feet of Teh Global Economy. She warns that if we don’t act to turn it around we face a future in which 25% of the adult population will be unable to participate in the economy and will be an economic burden on our national capacity.

So much for dickheads like former Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott defending the right of junk food corporations to profit from advertising their wares to young children. So much for those who hapily degrade the quality of community and family life in the pursuit of excessive and unsustainable levels of material affluence.

Check it out if you’re not afraid to have your complacency challenged.